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Ashley Place, Westminster, London, England · December 1868
A small gathering in a darkened London room became one of Victorian Spiritualism’s most famous stories. Three sitters said the medium Daniel Dunglas Home left through one window and returned through another, high above the street. Their accounts describe a warning, the sound of an adjoining window opening, a figure outside and an extraordinary second demonstration.
A London sitting with three named witnesses
The gathering took place at Ashley House in Ashley Place, near Victoria Street, in December 1868. Its witnesses were Lord Adare, the Master of Lindsay and Captain Charles Wynne, Adare’s cousin. Adare and Lindsay later became the Earl of Dunraven and Earl of Crawford respectively, so later retellings can appear to introduce extra witnesses when they are simply using different titles.
Home was the centre of the sitting. The fullest readily accessible early collection used here is his widow’s D. D. Home: His Life and Mission, published in 1888. She reproduced Adare’s description, Lindsay’s testimony and Wynne’s later letter as part of an openly supportive biography.
The episode is generally dated 13 December 1868 in later accounts, while the 1888 biography prints 16 December. This file uses December 1868 for the case heading rather than silently making the two dates agree. The principal interest lies in what the named witnesses actually described.
The room, the light and Lindsay’s warning
Adare wrote that he and Wynne went to Ashley House after dinner and found Home with Lindsay. They sat around a table in a small room. There was no artificial light in it, but he considered the light entering from outside sufficient to distinguish the people and furniture.
In his account Home entered a trance. Lindsay then became alarmed, saying he knew something frightening was about to happen. Asked to explain, he said a spirit had informed him that Home would go out through the window in the next room and return through the window beside the sitters.
Adare’s description makes an important sequence clear. The group heard Home go into the adjoining room and heard its window being opened. Their view of the supposed crossing began with his appearance outside their own window; Adare did not describe standing at the departure window and watching every part of an uninterrupted outdoor journey.
That arrangement gives the story its dramatic shape: a prediction, a period out of the sitters’ immediate view, and then an arrival at the window they were watching.
What Lindsay said he saw
Lindsay’s version similarly begins with an inward or whispered warning that Home would leave one window and return through the other. He described the sound of the neighbouring window opening and then seeing Home outside the window in their room.
In Lindsay’s account Home’s figure and feet were visible in relation to the window; he subsequently came through and sat down. Lindsay put the height at about seventy feet above the ground and estimated the separation between the windows at about seven feet six inches.
These measurements became central to the legend because they turn a strange room incident into an apparent passage across an exterior wall. They are the witness’s reported measurements or estimates, not a modern survey of an identified surviving façade.
Lindsay also repeated the subsequent exchange about the opening in the other room. His account and Adare’s therefore share the broad sequence, while differing in some physical details and in the language used to describe the return.
Adare follows Home into the adjoining room
After Home had returned, Adare said he was asked to close the other window. He noticed how little it had been raised and wondered how anyone could have passed through. Home then invited him to see a further demonstration.
Adare reported opening the window to its earlier position and standing a short distance away. Home went through the aperture head first, with his body nearly horizontal and apparently rigid, then returned feet first. This second movement was described by Adare at closer quarters, separately from the first passage between rooms.
He added that it was too dark to see clearly how Home was supported outside. He did not think Home grasped or rested on the balustrade, but compared the motion to being swung out and in. That sentence is worth preserving because it is more specific than the later shorthand that everyone watched a man freely floating across the whole exterior.
Adare supplied measurements: small balconies or ledges nineteen inches deep, stone balustrades eighteen inches high, a gap of seven feet four inches between their nearest points, and narrow string-courses running along the wall. He placed the rooms on the third floor. Lindsay’s more approximate figures and Adare’s description should be read alongside one another.
The rest of the sitting
The reported evening did not end at the window. Adare’s narrative continues with strange lights around Home’s head, sounds like a bird moving around the room, and a rushing wind that the sitters both heard and felt.
Within the account, the observers did not agree on every sensory detail. Lindsay said he perceived an indistinct birdlike form, whereas the others heard the sound without seeing such a form. This gives a fuller sense of the gathering as a séance with several kinds of reported experience, rather than an isolated aerial demonstration staged for a camera.
Home’s condition afterwards also forms part of Adare’s description. Once awake from the trance, he appeared agitated and spoke of having passed through danger and feeling an urge to throw himself from a window. Adare said he gradually became calm. These are the sitter’s observations and recollections of the evening.
Wynne’s letter and Crookes’s often-confused role
Wynne’s written support survives in a letter dated 2 February 1877, responding to Home after a renewed controversy. A critic had suggested that the third sitter might have interpreted the incident differently. Wynne rejected that suggestion and said he had witnessed Home go out of one window and return through another.
The letter is explicit support from the third named sitter, but it was written years afterwards and is shorter than Adare’s scene-by-scene account. Its significance is therefore different: it records Wynne’s later position in a public dispute rather than supplying a second detailed journal for the night.
The scientist William Crookes is also frequently drawn into the story. In his published discussions he supported reports of Home’s levitation and referred to testimony about this incident. He was not one of the three Ashley Place witnesses.
Crookes’s own descriptions of seeing Home rise in other circumstances belong to separate sittings. Keeping those episodes separate allows readers to follow the actual Ashley Place witness group without adding a famous observer who was not there.
Why the window story endured
The episode offers unusually concrete hooks for historical research: three names, two rooms, windows, ledges, different written accounts and a later exchange of letters. It also shows how a detailed narrative can become compressed. The familiar picture of a continuously watched flight seventy feet above London is simpler than the surviving descriptions.
The widow’s book is best explored by reading the reproduced witness passages before her conclusions. Her confident interpretation is part of the history of Spiritualism, while the letters and measurements let readers examine how that interpretation was assembled.
The UKPX pin is deliberately a street-area reference. Rebuilding the precise scene would require secure identification of the original building and its nineteenth-century arrangement; a modern postcode point cannot do that work. The case sits in the Spiritual & Psychic channel because its setting and interpretation arose directly from mediumship and the séance tradition.
Timeline
December 1868 — Ashley Place sitting with Home, Adare, Lindsay and Wynne; later sources differ over the precise day.
1869 — Adare’s records of experiences with Home circulated in book form.
1874 — Crookes discussed levitation reports; he was not an Ashley Place eyewitness.
4 January–2 February 1877 — Home’s inquiry and Wynne’s supporting reply during a renewed controversy.
1888 — Mme Dunglas Home reproduced the principal accounts in His Life and Mission.
Sources & further reading
Mme Dunglas Home, D. D. Home: His Life and Mission (1888) — See printed pp. 164–172: Lindsay, Adare, Wynne’s letter and the discussion of Crookes. Biography with reproduced witness material.
Searchable transcription of the 1888 book — Full text; search Ashley House or Wynne to locate the reproduced accounts.
Ashley Place postcode location — Modern street-area coordinates used only for the broad UKPX map reference.
Nadar’s portrait of Home — Historic portrait, BnF/Gallica provenance and public-domain reuse record.
Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology: Levitation — Later reference entry distinguishing the 13 December date from the initially printed 16 December.
UKPX historical case file. Researched and checked 3 November 2026. The map marks the Ashley Place street area using a modern postcode reference. It is not a verified window position, a present-day séance venue or an invitation to enter private premises.
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